COVID-19 and news media bias
"The media's lab leak fiasco" by Matthew Yglesias in Slow Boring https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-medias-lab-leak-fiasco
I'll admit, this is what finally convinced me that there was something wrong with how mainstream news media in the US covered the "lab-leak" hypothesis regarding COVID-19 early in the pandemic. I don't subscribe to the sort of "I told you so" attitude that some seem to have (there's still no real conclusion about whether a lab contributed to the pandemic, and "the" lab-leak hypothesis is a misnomer as it can encompass a wide variety of claims), but it lays out exactly how certain early lab-leak claims got mangled into conspiracy theories.
COVID-19 and news media bias
I'm inclined to say that something similar happened with Donald Trump's possible connections to Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign and early in his presidency, which is another thing that led to lots of accusations of media bias. I think the "fake consensus" there came about from the news reporting on people's *claims* of collusion which led to this view being amplified.
(Somewhat related: "The Media Very Rarely Lies" by Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies )
